On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Platonides platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/05/12 11:22, Merlijn van Deen wrote:
How do we make sure tools do not disappear? By making multi-maintainer projects for them. However, we see that this doesn't happen enough - see also the thread about the expiration of soxred93's account.
Options for improvement: - better communication with wikis - which tools are used a lot and *thus* should be moved to mmp's? - easier creation of mmp's? I can imaging people don't move their tools because it takes time to organise everything.
It's relatively hard to create a MMP. Compare that with the complexity of doing a mkdir for creating a project in your account. Add to that the relatively low interest of other people for maintaining external projects (as shown by Magnus mail). There's little reason to create a MMP in advance. Plus, each of is coding using different languages, conventions and "frameworks" (helper functions).
Maybe we should use a model where stable tools are available in a repository where all users can commit. The code can only be updated through that. As an alternative, each project could be in either open-gate or closed-gate model. In the first one, anyone can commit there. In the second one, there's just a subset of users which can directly commit (commits by others must be approved by a project member). If the accounts for all the project members expire (it gets orphan), the tool automatically changes to open-gate mode.
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An other idea, albeit one requiring more planning, coding, and cooperation (and we are notoriously bad at two of these) would be to separate front-end and back-end. If we could set up a MMP that presents an API for the queries and data storage of several tools, anyone (at the very least, anyone on the toolserver) could write a front-end; also, taking over a front-end from someone else might be more maintenance-friendly.
We could even offer consistent stylesheets for toolserver tools (hey, one can dream?)
Cheers, Magnus